I performed at a show at the MoMA. There was this big dinner there, and I was seated in this hall with the mayor of New York and all these extremely wealthy art-supporting and art-buying people. There was a piece of work hanging in the hall-it was a fan. This fan was supposed to swing by the momentum of its own propeller. So, while we were having dinner, the fan was stopped, and the guy next to me, a curator at P. S.1, said, "Look, this is what art symbolizes today." Like, that piece of art is supposed to be moving, but just to have dinner we've stopped the art. That's what New York is like today. You can't have real art happen in an institution because rich people can make the world stop. The stuff on the street is a lot more interesting.
M.I.A.Related topics
art big curator dinner fan guy hall hanging having institution mayor momentum moving next people piece propeller real rich say show stop street stuff swing wealthy while work world todayRelated quotes
The condition of mankind is, and always has been, so miserable and depraved that, if anyone were to say to the poet: "For God's sake stop singing and do something useful like putting on the kettle or fetching bandages," what just reason could he give for refusing? But nobody says this. The self-appointed unqualified nurse says: "You are to sing the patient a song which will make him believe that I, and I alone, can cure him. If you can't or won't, I shall confiscate your passport and send you to the mines." And the poor patient in his delirium cries: "Please sing me a song which will give me sweet dreams instead of nightmares. If you succeed, I will give you a penthouse in New York or a ranch in Arizona."
W. H. Auden
11. We shall sing the great masses shaken with work, pleasure, or rebellion: we shall sing the multicolored and polyphonic tidal waves of revolution in the modern metropolis; shall sing the vibrating nocturnal fervor of factories and shipyards burning under violent electrical moons; bloated railroad stations that devour smoking serpents; factories hanging from the sky by the twisting threads of spiraling smoke; bridges like gigantic gymnasts who span rivers, flashing at the sun with the gleam of a knife; adventurous steamships that scent the horizon, locomotives with their swollen chest, pawing the tracks like massive steel horses bridled with pipes, and the oscillating flight of airplanes, whose propeller flaps at the wind like a flag and seems to applaud like a delirious crowd.
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
Thanks! Ever since I was a little kid, I wanted this! You don't know... my brother sitting there, he says "Thank God we don't have to listen to anymore... you can do it now!" My mom's home, everyone's watching... I have to thank the people at Paramount; I have to thank Jerry Zucker for taking the time he took before he decided to use me because he was sure it was for me... I have to thank Patrick Swazye... he was a stand up guy and went to them and said "I wanna do it with her"... I wanna thank Demi... I wanna thank everybody who makes movies... I come from New York; as a kid, I lived in the projects and you're the people I watched... you're the people that made me wanna be an actor... I'm so proud to be here, I'm proud to be an actor and I'm gonna keep on acting, and thank you so much!
Whoopi Goldberg
Like any large organization, there are going to be some bad people. Many people go to church; not every priest is a good guy. But you don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. Wounded Warrior is an important organization, and all the various vet groups are important because, shamefully, we don't have an amendment to the Constitution that guarantees if you volunteer to serve your country, and risk life and limb, that you're even going to get a job, so that you can feed your family. It's pathetic. ‘Hey, thanks a lot for risking your life, and you've been wounded. Good luck out there!' The men and women of our military may not expect to get rich and famous, but at least give them a job for God's sake, so they can feed their family!
Gene Simmons
Society is eliminating the prerogatives and privileges of feudal. aristocratic culture together with its content. The fact that the transcending truths of the fine arts, the aesthetics of life and thought, were accessible only to the few wealthy and educated was the fault of a repressive society. But this fault is not corrected by paperbacks, general education, long-playing records, and the abolition of formal dress in the theater and concert hall. The cultural privileges expressed the injustice of freedom, the contradiction between ideology and reality, the separation of intellectual from material productivity; but they also provided a protected realm in which the tabooed truths could survive in abstract integrity-remote from the society which suppressed them.
Herbert Marcuse
